This website uses cookies to deliver some of our products and services as well as for analytics and to provide you a more personalized experience. Click here to learn more. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our use of cookies. We've also updated our Privacy Notice. Click here to see what's new.

This website uses cookies to deliver some of our products and services as well as for analytics and to provide you a more personalized experience. Click here to learn more. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our use of cookies. We've also updated our Privacy Notice. Click here to see what's new.

About Optics & Photonics TopicsOSA Publishing developed the Optics and Photonics Topics to help organize its diverse content more accurately by topic area. This topic browser contains over 2400 terms and is organized in a three-level hierarchy. Read more.

Topics can be refined further in the search results. The Topic facet will reveal the high-level topics associated with the articles returned in the search results.

Abstract

We present a novel all-fiber pumped optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier (OPCPA) architecture to generate self-carrier-to-envelope-phase stable, sub-eight-optical-cycle duration pulses at 7 μm wavelength approaching millijoule-level pulse energy at 100 Hz repetition rate. The system yields a peak power of 1.1 GW and, if focused to the diffraction limit, would reach a peak intensity of 7×1014W/cm2. The OPCPA is pumped by a 2 μm Ho:YLF chirped pulse amplifier to leverage the highly efficient and broadband response of the nonlinear crystal ZGP. The 7 μm seed at 100 MHz is generated via difference frequency generation from an Er:Tm:Ho multi-arm fiber frequency comb, and a fraction of its output optically injects the Ho:YLF amplifier. While the pulse bandwidth at 7 μm is perfectly suited for nonlinear and spectroscopic applications, current parameters offer, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the possibility to explore strong-field physics in an entirely new wavelength range with a ponderomotive force 77 times larger than from an 800 nm source. The overall OPCPA system is very compact and provides a new tool for investigations directly in the molecular fingerprint region of the electro-magnetic spectrum or to drive high harmonic generation to produce fully coherent x-rays in the multi-kiloelectron-volt range and possibly zeptosecond temporal waveforms.

Fig. 2. Spectrum of the mid-IR pulses amplified in the ZGP OPAs (black line, shaded) measured using a scanning monochromator and seed spectrum from the CSP DFG stage (gray line) measured with a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. The spectral width of the OPCPA output at the 13.5% point is 1360 nm—corresponding to the 85 fs transform limit.

Fig. 3. Autocorrelation trace from a background-free intensity autocorrelation. Shown are the compressed pulses (blue circle) with the best-fitted pulse shape, which is a Lorentzian profile (solid red line). The deconvolution results in a pulse duration of 180 fs. Measured spatial profile (inset) of the compressed pulse at the output of the OPCPA.